Stumble This Site and the Random Page Redirect

Cool little plugin courtesy of Techcrunch and Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, called Random Redirect, which will give you a random page from your database every time you click it, I’m not going to install it, as it may lead to more duplicate page problems with Wordpress, but if you redirect it through a folder that is blocked in your robots.txt file, you should be able to keep Google from indexing it. Techcrunch installed it, try it by click here, download it here.

This all came about because of the Site Specific Stumbling that was added by Stumbleupon, which allows you to Stumble upon other pages on the site you are on that you might be interested in. This sounds like a great feature, I’m all for Stumbleupon users browsing my site more, as they are usually looking for that type of content when they arrive on your site.

It’s a cool way to find those YouTube videos or Onion articles that will appeal most to you. But I agree with Rafe Needleman - StumbleUpon should release this functionality through an API and let sites include a “Stumble” button. If the reader is a StumbleUpon user, it will take them to a page on the site that they’ll like. If they aren’t, it should take them to a random page on that site and can prompt them to become a StumbleUpon user to get more customized results. Source: New StumbleUpon Feature: Site Specific Stumbling

This is on the heels of eBay acquisition of Stumbleupon

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 - $45 million). Source: eBay Acquiring StumbleUpon

And the subsequent announcement by Google of their competing product that is being added into the Google Toolbar.

The Google Toolbar now includes a dice icon. Click it and you’ll be taken to a new website that Google thinks you’ll find interesting based on your previous search queries.

This isn’t an exact duplicate of StumbleUpon functionality, which bases recommendations on your and other StumbleUpon users’ votes of sites. But the end result is the same - serendipitous discovery of new and interesting websites based on your core interests. Source: Google Rains On StumbleUpon Parade: Launches Direct Competitor Announcement at Searching without a query

I agree with Arrington on Techcrunch, I would like to be able to add a plugin to my wordpress installs and add a button that says stumble on this site or something similar, with Arrington asking for it, I bet it will get added eventually, at least if for only the subsequent blog post.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels April 2007

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